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Lamonte Tyler was convinced the Charlottesville Judo Academy could never win a team trophy at a large invitational tournament. Competing against teams six times its size, the numbers were stacked too high against them.

“When we compete, we never bring enough people to win the team trophy,” Tyler said.

At the Eastern Open in Beltsville , Md., on Aug. 19, the Charlottesville team found a way to defy the numbers. Sending a team of only five people in the senior division, the Charlottesville team had five first-place finishes; enough to give the tournaments smallest group the overall team trophy.

Tyler, Kurban Komilov, Kim Carpenter and Gordon Emery all finished in first place in a tournament that included teams from Connecticut, Pennsylvania, New York and North Carolina and featured more than 350 entrants in the junior and senior divisions.

Led by sensei Tim Redden, the Charlottesville Judo Academy meets twice a week at the Piedmont YMCA building in Charlottesville . Redden, who has been in town for almost 10 years, has seen his program grow steadily.

“If we had 12 people in the class back then, it was a big class,” said Redden, who served as a volunteer at the 1996 Olympics, where he catalogued each judo match and communicated with the foreign press. “Now, we have had as many as 30 kids on the mat at one time, and that’s actually too big for this room.”

His facility features a new $12,000 custom-fit mat and a larger space to accommodate the increasing numbers of people showing up Tuesday and Friday nights to learn from Redden. Even the first-place finishers at the Eastern Open are relative newcomers to the sport. Emery, who took the middleweight title, was competing in his first judo tournament. He has been training in jiu-jitsu for the past two years ago and has competed in several jiu-jitsu tournaments. In early 2005, he started to learn judo, as well.

Tyler is a jiu-jitsu instructor who also teaches kickboxing and coaches youth wrestling. He started taking judo 2 year to build a more comprehensive martial arts repertoire.

“Judo is the best thing to happen to me while in Charlottesville as a student,” said Tyler, who finished in first place in the master’s heavyweight division and third in the 100-kilogram-and-over division. “In order to be successful in martial arts, you’re not complete unless you know how to throw. Unless you know how to take your opponent down, you’re not complete.”

Komilov, a native of Russia , has been interested in judo his entire life but is only a high school student. He moved up to compete with adults in the Eastern Open and took first place in the senior novice lightweight division. Carpenter, also a jiu-jitsu student of about 3 months, a graduate student at the University of Virginia , finished first in the women’s lightweight division.

The club also had four juniors competing in the tournament, with Ruslan Usmanov and Ibraim Mushtalov taking third place in the 15-16 lightweight and 11-12 lightweight divisions, respectively. Pablo-Redden Gonzalez and Stuart Champion also competed as juniors but did not place.

The first-place sweep by the adult competitors was less of a surprise than the finishes earning enough points for the team trophy. He hadn’t even considered his team’s chances of winning, but when Emery heard his team announced as the winner, it made perfect sense to him.

“I hadn’t really noticed it, but right at that moment I was like ‘Oh yeah, we all did win first place,’” Emery said.

As the senior member of the team, Tyler had the honor of accepting the trophy on behalf of the squad, holding in his hands what he thought his team would never be able to achieve.

“It amazed me,” Tyler said. “I was most impressed with the training we all received. That right there that shows that if you have good training, regardless of how many people you have, you can accomplish the unthinkable.”

March 9, 2006

		Images from the new school.
Chad Satterfield